Obsidian's Chris Avellone indicated that Obsidian just missed a bonus for Fallout: New Vegas, reports Joystiq, saying this came in a tweet from a no longer existent account, allegedly saying: "[Fallout: New Vegas] was a straight payment, no royalties, only a bonus if we got an 85+ on Metacritic, which we didn't." Sure enough, the game currently sits at 84 on Metacritic. They also note their report of layoffs at Obsidian, though these are still unconfirmed. Thanks nin.

And considering a vast amount of resources from FO3 were reused in FO:NV, including the engine with very few modifications, it SHOULD have taken them half the resources and time to make NV.

Sure, if you ignore the fact that the game had significantly more content than FO3. There were more weapons, more items, more armor, more companions, more quests and more enemies, not to mention that the quests were far more open-ended than the ones in FO3 and had branching paths.

Was there some recycled content? Sure. Some of the music was even from FO1 and 2. However, the majority of content was new.

It was Fallout 3 in a more bland environment and the 50's motif was de-emphasized.

This seems to be the general opinion among those who favor FO3 and really the only argument they can use against FNV. At superficial level, the locales in FO3 were more unique and interesting than those in FNV, largely because they were based on silly (and usually illogical gimmicks). Who the hell decides to build a town around an unexploded nuclear bomb that's leaking radiation? How do generations of children survive for hundreds of years inside a cave? How does a town full of completely inept people with no defenses survive at all? How does a tall, poorly-guarded building standing alone in the wasteland survive against super mutants, raiders, robots, etc? How does a town of a few, poorly-armed cannibals survive at all? Why does DC look like it was nuked a week ago when it's actually been hundreds of years since the war?

The more you thought about the characters and locations in FO3, the less sense they made. Conversely, the more you thought about the locations and characters in FNV, the more you appreciated them. That's because they actually made sense and had a logical place in the lore. Every location had a real sense of place and history.

On a side note, Fallout 1 and 2 never really emphasized the 50's motif either.

"You should know by now that any individual's experience with a game is not guaranteed to be the norm. There's people out there in the exact opposite position that you're in where FO3 ran flawlessly and NV crashed repeatedly."

Paranoid Jack wrote on Mar 15, 2012, 22:06:I'm sitting here trying to figure out all these "buggy as shit" comments. FNV was ten times better in almost every aspect compared to F3. I'm baffled. I never got far into Fallout 3 because the constant crashes drove me bat-shit crazy. It started thirty seconds outside of Vault 13. And after suffering through the most horrid tutorial phase of any game created... I shudder to think about starting F3 over as a baby.

Bethesda claimed it was my sound card. I removed the drivers and the card itself and the game continued to crash randomly no matter what I tried. I just shelved it and after they patched it I'd try to play it over and over again always giving up.

If it were not for FNV I doubt I would have bought Skyrim. My opinion of Bethesda was so low I didn't think I wanted to suffer through another crash-fest. And I remember Morrowind and Oblivion being buggy too. Though nothing compared to the mess F3 was.

After playing dozens of hours of FNV I think it crashed to desktop maybe three times. I even played it on my older machine to see if it was the machine or the program. FNV played fine on the same machine F3 was extremely unstable on.

I know Obsidian makes a lot of bad decisions when it comes to the deals they sign with the Devils of the industry... but damn. They need to start learning from these things. Maybe they should have flown in the gaming media from around the world... paying for all the food, booze, and prostitutes they could possibly handle like Bethesda did when they started up the hype machine for the F3 release?

You should know by now that any individual's experience with a game is not guaranteed to be the norm. There's people out there in the exact opposite position that you're in where FO3 ran flawlessly and NV crashed repeatedly.

Incidentally did anyone actually follow Chris Avellone before? It seems suspicious to me that his twitter account simply vanished as soon as this story hit and that was the only evidence of this story being 'true' in the first place.

I hope Obsidian can survive this and hopefully make another Fallout game, improving upon NV. That said, NV sure was buggy at release. But, they had huge bugfix patches with their DLC releases that were very welcome. I found NV's world not as good as F3's. Bethesda is one of the best at creating open-world sandbox RPG's. I'm sure the NV story and rpg elements were improved on F3's, but the gameplay didn't feel better. It was Fallout 3 in a more bland environment and the 50's motif was de-emphasized. I like NV, just not as much as F3. I have yet to play OWB, which sounds like it would be right up my alley with lots of exploration. I will buy Obsidian's next Fallout game as long as it stays hardcore like NV and isn't dumbed down.

Cutter wrote on Mar 15, 2012, 22:02:Well that's how it goes. Same in sports. Don't do enough of XYZ and no bonus for you. Given how much money they make with this sort of stuff anyway I doubt anyone is shedding any tears for them.

Obsidian needs to do a Kickstarter for a new CRPG creator in the vein of NWN!

But at least in sports, MOST of those clauses are something you at least have some margin of control over. You get a bonus if you win the MVP, which is mostly in your hands. You get a bonus if you hit the most three-pointers in the season, which is pretty much in your hands (no pun intended.)

Etc. Some of those clauses are still dependent on the views of others (in the case of the MVP award in baseball, in the hands of the retarded fossils that make up the BBWAA, who shouldn't be allowed to fucking vote on what to have for lunch today,) but in the case of Obsidian, it's basically all out of their hands.

And like someone mentioned below, the bar being set at 85% is already shitty, because it means that a site that scores on a 1-5 basis HAS to give you a 5, otherwise your average goes down.

Just a bad deal all around. I hope the cash they got made up for it.

Creston

Not really, Cres. Most of them are pretty specific. You need to sack a QB X amount of times or have so many shut-outs or the like. They're reasonable but they still have a hard cap. As others have mentioned, it was just bad negotiating on their part. Much better to go the route about general sales targets than some arbitrary review mechanic.

“That's it. You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college!”

Acleacius wrote on Mar 15, 2012, 23:03:This is bullshit and so is bethesda.

Yeah them arseholes!!11 How dare they outsource FNV to Obsidian instead of an Eastern European RPG sweatshop where they could have had FNV made for a fraction and still raked in the millions just off of brand recognition?

Obsidian had less than half the resources and time bethesda took on Fallout 3. Fallout New Vegas was a better game by all accounts for the limited time and money they had budgeted.

Yes and have you heard? The fuckers from Bethesda forced every dev at Obsidian to tie one of their arms to the chair and put tape over one of their eyes! The working conditions must have been true horror! HORRORORORORORORORAAAWRRRR!!!!

Fion wrote on Mar 15, 2012, 21:04:How can this incredible game not have an 85 at Metacritic? Sure the first few days were rocky but over all New Vegas is WORLDS better than Fallout 3 (which has a 91). Not to mention it's easily the best Obsidian game.. ever lol.

I don't put up ratings on Metacritic, but if I had FO:NV would have rated poorly because 120 hours in, my game was not able to be finished due to a bugged save from 60 odd hours previous in the ghoul/rocketship misson, despite turning off autosave and doing separate manual saves...

I didn't bother to play the DLC still waiting for me because standing on Hoover dam unable to finish the finale of the original piece because every area I'd load in to would CTD the game completely ruined what had been, until then, a pretty awesome experience.

So f#ck em, they don't deserve a bonus and I'm glad they didn't get it. I doubt it will, because the kind of introspection which results in the conclusion "mebbe if we didn't put out buggy POS's, our scores would be higher" hasn't occurred yet for Obsidian.

Reminds me of Troika, at the core they made 2 great games, but the had shithouse QA...

Obsidian had less than half the resources and time bethesda took on Fallout 3. Fallout New Vegas was a better game by all accounts for the limited time and money they had budgeted.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.That is easy.All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.It works the same way in any country.

Parallax Abstraction wrote on Mar 15, 2012, 21:36:Aside from it being a standard industry practice, it's easy to say that when you're choices are sign that deal or possibly have to close your company and lay all your staff off because it's your only prospect. Independent AAA developers (especially ones who are in a work-for-hire state and don't own their own IP) operate in a brutal business environment right now where the publishers basically have all the cards. You play by their rules or you go out of business. I'm curious what you'd do when faced with such a choice.

I wouldn't say that the publishers hold ALL the cards. There aren't too many for-hire dev houses out there to handle a huge RPG like FNV. The publishers wanted to cash in after the good sales and reviews of Fallout 3, but Bethesda was busy with Skyrim, so they needed to go third party. Obsidian is a name-dev house with a strong pedigree. Who else would they go with?

That being said, perhaps this was a bonus on top of sales-based bonus, which is where the real action is. If the dev isn't getting sales based bonuses as well, then yeah, they're stupid. In the movie industry no one cares if a movie scores terribly on Rottentomatoes or Metacritic, as long as it makes $$$. Do you think studios are NOT throwing money at Michael Bay, for example? Almost all the movies the man has ever made have scored less than 50% on RT, but he's made billions of $ for the movie industry. If the studio told MB he would only get a bonus if he scored an 85 or higher on RT, he'd tell them to go F themselves.

Vanilla FNV is good by itself but really there's no reason not to at least mod the textures and slap a bug-fix mod on. The ultimate FNV pack is definitely worth the $5 or $10 or whatever it costs if you use mods.

Cutter wrote on Mar 15, 2012, 22:02:Well that's how it goes. Same in sports. Don't do enough of XYZ and no bonus for you. Given how much money they make with this sort of stuff anyway I doubt anyone is shedding any tears for them.

Obsidian needs to do a Kickstarter for a new CRPG creator in the vein of NWN!

But at least in sports, MOST of those clauses are something you at least have some margin of control over. You get a bonus if you win the MVP, which is mostly in your hands. You get a bonus if you hit the most three-pointers in the season, which is pretty much in your hands (no pun intended.)

Etc. Some of those clauses are still dependent on the views of others (in the case of the MVP award in baseball, in the hands of the retarded fossils that make up the BBWAA, who shouldn't be allowed to fucking vote on what to have for lunch today,) but in the case of Obsidian, it's basically all out of their hands.

And like someone mentioned below, the bar being set at 85% is already shitty, because it means that a site that scores on a 1-5 basis HAS to give you a 5, otherwise your average goes down.

Creston wrote on Mar 15, 2012, 21:16:Not sure why you'd ever agree to a deal where you get money based on an aggregate score of subjective views by third parties.

No tears shed here.

Creston

Aside from it being a standard industry practice, it's easy to say that when you're choices are sign that deal or possibly have to close your company and lay all your staff off because it's your only prospect. Independent AAA developers (especially ones who are in a work-for-hire state and don't own their own IP) operate in a brutal business environment right now where the publishers basically have all the cards. You play by their rules or you go out of business. I'm curious what you'd do when faced with such a choice.

Take the deal, obviously. But I wouldn't cry about my missed bonus. You know going in that that's a deck that's fully stacked AGAINST you.

Not saying Avellone is crying about it; I can't determine whether he's saying this as a "Yeah, it sucked, but oh well" or a "DAMMIT FUCK WE MISSED THAT BONUS!" kind of way.

All I'm saying is, if you sign a shitty contract, don't be surprised to get fucked by it.

Very excited to hear this.. Game was a bugged out piece of trash that did nothing but rip me and piss me off... I applaud them not getting paid a extra dime.. They don't deserve it. They didnt deserve half of what they got from the straight payment either.